Budd Schulberg

Cristina Cano for The New York Times

Updated August 5, 2009

Budd Schulberg was a screenwriter and novelist known for the 1954 Oscar-winning film "On the Waterfront," in which Marlon Brando played a longshoreman who "coulda been a contender," and the 1941 novel "What Makes Sammy Run?," in which Mr. Schulberg created an all-American symbol of ambition, Sammy Glick. Mr. Schulberg died on Aug. 5, 2009.

For "On the Waterfront," Mr. Schulberg won the Academy Award for best screenplay.

The son of a powerful movie executive, B. P. Schulberg, Mr. Schulberg wrote about Hollywood moguls, political ideologues and mob bosses who took advantage of ordinary people. "It's the writer's responsibility to stand up against that power," he said in an interview with The New York Times in July 2006. "The writers are really almost the only ones, except for very honest politicians, who can make any dent on that system. I tried to do that. And that's affected me my whole life."

In "What Makes Sammy Run?," the novel's antihero is a young man who will do almost anything to achieve success. He rises from a newspaper copy boy to a Hollywood executive solely because of his ambition.

In 1951, Mr. Schulberg testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his years as a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. The 1950s was an embattled era of the Hollywood blacklist and the House committee's relentless investigation of the influence of the party on the film industry, and Mr. Schulberg named names before the committee. His decision was seen as a betrayal by many, an act of principle by others.

In the 2006 interview, Mr. Schulberg said that in hindsight he believed that the attacks against real and imagined Communists in the United States were a greater threat to the country than the Communist Party itself. But he said he had named names because the party represented a real threat to freedom of speech.

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April 23, 2008, Wednesday

Dartmouth College has acquired the papers of the novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, a 1936 graduate of the school, for an undisclosed sum. Mr. Schulberg, left, was the author of the screenplay for ''On the Waterfront'' (1954), the novel ''What...

November 21, 2006, Tuesday

To the Editor: The review of Dave Kindred's ''Sound and Fury'' (March 19) notes that the book opens with an apt quotation from Edith Wharton. The quote is apt for a book about the friendship of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, but neither the book...